My middle initial is the letter P. No, I’m not going to let you in on what it really stands for but I will tell you that I have always substituted the name I hate so much with the word procrastinate. I will put anything off till the last minute. I’ll probably live to be 106 just because I won’t have been arsed to have gotten round to dying. The downside of this is most apparent to poor Luke, who has to deal with lame excuse after lame excuse from me why a certain review has yet to materialize in his inbox. Well I take this opportunity to make a public apology to you Luke and to say, as if you hadn’t already realised, that I’m a lazy git who takes far too long to produce anything. And when I do they are certainly never good enough to warrant the amount of time spent on them.

Can you see where this is going?

Five years man, five years. A blue whale take less time to gestate, be born and become sexually active. The soviet empire imploded in half that and Ron Jeremy doesn’t work up a sweat to make 300 pornos in that time frame. So what on Earth could have caused Digital Anvil to take such an unfeasibly long time to release a game that is astoundingly awash with waters from the Great Sea of Rushedness? I can’t answer that question fully. There were problems with publishers and creative differences in the team. The innovative force behind the Wing Commander series of games - of which this is a descendant - Chris Roberts left before half-time was reached. bailed out the game when many feared it would never make it to full-time, yet it seems that while they provided the money to get the game finished they made some other demands which have diluted Roberts’ original idea, most probably so the title would port well to the Xbox.

All is not bad in the realm of games that have an incredibly long time. Primarily the game will run like a dream on just about any machine which fits the minimum-specs. For once there is a game that comes in a box whose specifications panel is not a total fabrication. I got this baby running at full tilt on my mid-range machine, at a resolution of 1600x1200, all knobs and whistles duly knobbing and whistling away. I even managed to get a little FSAA on the go without hampering the flow of the graphics. As a result this is the crispest looking game to have ever graced my monitor, and fortunately the work of the art team is as stellar as that of the coding department. There are dozens of different craft, stations and other emplacements that are all pleasing to the eye with each managing to convey a sense of scale and wonder not seen since the Freespace titles. Each of the many regions of space is filled with different objects, from nebula clouds to minefields through asteroids, magnetic storms and many more special anomalies. The many planets are finely detailed, with differing terrain for each one and a lovely atmospheric shimmer which coats the whole planet. This game does look fantastic and it would seem that the modelers and artists had spare time to polish up their efforts. Something that can’t be said for the audio department, but I’ll come back to that later. Freelancer has also only just been patched, a whole three months after its release. Seeing as this patch only addresses some aspects you can appreciate what a solid, reliable job the programmers have done.

Freelancer was always intended to be an open game with a single player storyline that could be followed and left at will, and for the most part this is successfully implemented. The game starts off rather unimpressively with an unclear opening cutscene. You play the role of Edison Trent, and you are one of a handful of survivors from the mysterious destruction of the space station Freeport 7. You were there to collect some money from one of the other survivors but seeing as he is in intensive care you have to make some earning while you wait for his recovery. This leads you into the game proper as you take on some training missions for the Liberty space police, the local authorities, and the first of many factions you will deal with in the game. These initial missions allow you to familiarize yourself with the controls and gameplay before blasting off into the inky-black yonder.